He was an amazing guy, and at the end of his 89 years, I know I should focus on Rudi Nussbaum's faith in physics, his advocacy for nuclear disarmament and his passion for social justice.

Forgive me, then. Like Rudi, I can't get over his wife, Laureen.

She was 11 when they met, on Nussbaum's first trip to Amsterdam. Fleeing Frankfurt and the Nazis, his family arrived in 1938, moving into an apartment just around the corner from the Kleinses'. "Maybe 200 steps away," Laureen says.

Because the neighborhood was filled with Jewish immigrants, it quickly drew the Nazis' attention when the Germans occupied the Netherlands in 1940. When Rudi, at age 19, was forced into hiding -- first among peasants in the Dutch countryside, then in Amsterdam homes -- Laureen was "his liaison with the world. I would bring him flowers and books, and make him less miserable than he was."

It was a stunning burden for a teenage girl. In 1943, Nussbaum, posing as a Dutch agent for German security, disappeared into Spain, hoping to reach England. "I was so relieved when he was gone," Laureen admits, "I was 16. I could finally just be a schoolgirl and not worry about filling Rudi's emotional needs.

"He was back in a week."

His parents were already in the camps; his father would die at Auschwitz, his mother at Bergen-Belsen. "I would not have chosen, at the age of 13 or 14, a deep sense of obligation that someone was dependent upon you," Laureen says. "But in all situations in life, you have to rise to the occasion. We decided the other person was decent and worth it."

They married in 1947, two years after the war ended and Nussbaum found himself, at 23, lacking even a high school diploma. He went back to school, eventually gaining a doctorate in physics, and brought Laureen and the children to Indiana in 1954 for post-doctoral research.

"People here were so much less burdened by war memories than we were," Laureen recalls. "Life was so upbeat. The McCarthy era was over. There seemed to be more of a future here."

Nussbaum arrived at Portland State in the fall of 1959 and taught there for 28 years. He joined Oregon Physicians for Social Responsibility and took up the cause for the innocents living downwind from the radioactive emissions from Hanford.

"Knowing him," said long-time activist Lloyd Marbet, was quite an honor. He was a man who was not afraid to take on issues."

On his final trip to Amsterdam this summer, the end of a five-week vacation, Rudi and Laureen realized as they reached the airport that they'd forgotten their traditional Dutch herring.

"Which was ridiculous," Laureen says," because there was a fish market around the corner from our hotel. We tried to make up for it at the wrong time and in the wrong place."

As it was in the beginning.

On that search for the herring, Nussbaum was pushing a luggage cart down a ramp when he failed to notice four small steps.

He broke his neck in the fall. At the hospital, unable to breathe on his own, Rudi told Laureen that after 70 years, she could finally let him go.

Friends will gather to celebrate that life at 1:45 p.m. Sunday at the University Place Hotel and Conference Center on Southwest Lincoln Street, 200 steps, maybe, from the Portland State campus.